Bruster's Real Ice Cream — Restaurant in Williamsburg

Pulled up at 10:50am this morning. Sat in my car and waited for the young girl with pigtails to open up the store. She comes out at 11am , sees me, ignores that and goes about emptying the trash cans. At 11:02 apparently the rainbow shirt employee saunders up and says hello to her coworker. They both look my way and shake their heads. Rainbow shirt goes into the store. I'm waiting for any sign they are now open. None. No smile, no good morning, no we will be open in a second. None of that. I ask the pigtail girl from my car , 15 feet away , are you open? Clearly she didn't hear me. I get out of my car and ask 10 feet from her, are you open? No answer. Her back is to me. I say loudly, hey are you open today? She turns around and says why are you yelling at me! I say I have been standing here asking if you are open and you don't answer? She says , well I don't know! What time is it??? It's past 11am. I say. She says you don't need to yell. I wasn't. She says, you must have been too far away for me to hear! She stomps off. Still no one at the window. And I'm thinking if I am willing to sit waiting for an $8.50 ice cream cone , which is expensive, I should get the same welcome I got at Taco Bell minutes before. It went like this. Good morning, how can I help you? I need to read your menu. That's great, tell me when you are ready. I ordered seconds later. Thank you for your order , your total is $11, please come around. I get my order promptly and she says , thank you for coming today and have a great day. Simple customer service. But apparently at Brewsters it's my fault they didn't know the time, it's my fault I wanted an ice cream cone at 11am and it's just unreasonable of me to expect them to ask me how can I help you? Bottom line, I drove off without a cone. Who needs attitude with...

I love this place. I do. But my god, they cycle through slack-jawed teenage dimwits faster than any fast food place I've ever seen. It's fortunate that much of the job is scooping ice cream, because if they had to make decisions about how much heat and how long to apply it, they'd burn the place down in the opening 20 minutes. e.g. You don't get a lid on your ice cream at the drive-thru unless you ask for it. Like think about that. You're in your car, visibly alone, and they want to hand you a giant heaping bowl of ice cream already dripping down the sides, with no lid. Now imagine you ordered something for your people at home, for whom they will hand you 2, 3, 10, however many you want, all uncovered, like instead of your grandpa's outmoded car with cup holders you're riding around in some kind of elite clown car stocked with a dozen ice cream crevices and your own hose to rinse away the gooey mess. Try ordering a sundae without a 20 questions about how you want it done. I dunno, how about the way it's described on the freaking sign? Like when I go to McDonalds and order a burger, they don't ask "do you want ketchup? mustard? pickle? cheese? rare, well done or regular?" Sphinxes don't ask as many questions as these folks. I was interrogated less when I applied for a passport. The end result, once you coach them to it, is generally very satisfying. I only wonder if they could do something to train and retain staff (and/or reexamine some extremely basic customer service practices) to make the daunting task of transferring your ice cream from a bucket into a [lidded] bowl less...

I tried out this brusters and was not satisfied. The service was sub-par and the ice cream was repulsive. I eat brusters ice cream 24/7 therefore I know how things are suppose to taste. At arrival, I wanted to try out the new flavor of the month: espresso. But then I discovered that even though it was advertised on the coupons/website the ice cream was not made. I mean come on make up your mind guys. If you don't have time to make the flavor of the month DONT ADVERTISE IT. This led to me ordering one of my favorite flavors: butter brickle. I normally love this flavor, however it tasted terrible. The sea salt base was disgusting and the toffee tasted as if it was sitting in a freezing for a year with a few dead chickens. I didn't even finish the ice cream. On top of that, I had a coupon and the server said I couldn't get what the coupon was offering. Believe me when I say I was confused... I was confused. The crazy thing is; I had used the same deal with one of my other coupons a couple weeks prior! And then more times on top of that!!! I feel as if my server (who was a scooper) was a new hire and I got screwed over. I almost called over the crewleader so I could talk with him. When I think of this brusters: disorganized and gross are the adjectives that come to mind. Any other brusters would do them justice. Hopefully they can learn from the...